The Past is such a curious Creature
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: Sitting beside the fire Gilbert had dreamed of, a conversation and reflection.


"Gil, can I make a confession?" Anne asked.

They found themselves on the low sofa in front of the sitting room fire as they did most evenings; the hearth was lit and the drift-wood Captain Jim brought in a sea-grass basket of his own contrivance nearly every time he came to call made the fire leap unpredictably with unusual colors, the eerie green of a coming storm, violet like the amethysts Anne favored, a pale blue like a Northern aurora he'd heard about from a Manitoba man he'd trained with. There were some tea things on the table before them and he smiled to think how Anne nudged the cups together, "to be companions, oh, I think I wish everyone and everything to have such a dear, friendly lover as I do in you, Gil." She liked to rest her bright head against his shoulder and he liked to have her close by, for her voice reach his ear just as he felt it resonate from her body to his, an intimacy marriage allowed he could not have anticipated. In a little while, he would bank the fire and she would clear the fluted china cups and they would meet together in the airy room they shared and talk a little more in the darkness before one of them would reach for the other; Gilbert had not known how many lovely words he had within him to give her in between kisses and there were times he was not sure which stoked her ardor more.

But now, they were commanded by the proper decorum of the sitting room and it was enough that she nestled against him and that he held her hand in his. And he was compelled by her question and her tone, though he could not guess if she had acquired a Persian kitten or invited Miss Cornelia to dinner or ruined a shirt with too much starch. Or it could be something else entirely—once she had told him in a similar fashion of her discovery "there must be a mischievous fairy about our little House of Dreams, for I found a sheltered patch of bluebells just beyond the first Lombardy and however would they grow here otherwise?" the night before she admitted she just did not agree "with the conclusion of DuPlessis's article on the spinal nerves in the journal you left wide open, I know a provocation when I see it- and there is nothing you can say to change my mind!" She was a rare woman, Anne Blythe, and well he knew it.

"Of course, Anne-girl, you may tell me anything, always" he replied.

"I think I must be the must ungrateful person because Marilla and Matthew were more than I ever could have expected, but sometimes… I miss my mother. Isn't that silly? I don't know how I should, since I haven't one memory of her, really nothing that was even hers and I must be a greedy wretch for I find I do so wish I had a little something- a locket or a handkerchief, something she kept by her all the time," she explained.

She'd started talking a bit like this since they'd been married, since the first ecstatic weeks passed when they were both dazed with love and lust and passion, all sanctioned, the incredible freedom of the cottage, the garden, the sea easy upon the silver shore but boundless and wild as well. Now, they had achieved some balance with that exuberant, overwhelming force of mutual affection and there was space to have a conversation like this one, one Anne termed a "confession" as if she erred. But why shouldn't she want to have something of her mother, a memory or barring that, some little token? He didn't think she would ever have said anything like this to Marilla, for fear of hurting her, nor even to Diana or Phil or Stella, who'd all grown up in happy families, their homes the ones grandparents had had before, everyone settled and established, the connections carefully tended where Anne's had been broken and left to be salvaged as she would, alone. He thought of the solid, square Blythe farmhouse, Aunt Esther's quilts on every bed, the sense he had always had that he belonged there, the family pew, the fields behind the house and how Anne had not and what that would have been like for his sensitive wife. Would she have acknowledged being jealous of any of them, any of her girlhood chums, Marilla and Matthew in their family's home, himself, a 6th generation Blythe, all of Avonlea? He didn't think she could.

"I don't think you're ungrateful at all, sweetheart. You never talk about what it was like before you came to Green Gables, at least, not very much, but I suppose now that we are making our own home here, together, and since perhaps, sometime we may make another dearest wish come true, you must naturally be thinking more about your mother," he replied. Even that was not all, he thought, she needed no reason to miss her mother.

"I guess there isn't very much to say, not compared with how lovely everything, everyone was once I got to Green Gables, but I wonder sometimes, what, who Anne Shirley would have been like if I'd grown up in Bolingbroke with both my parents. If I'd had a sister like Diana, or all those brothers like Jane Andrews, or had been the apple of my father's eye. I'm so happy now, I can't imagine another life could have ever been as wonderful. But sometimes, when you're late coming home, or if Leslie or Captain Jim haven't been round and I get a little lonely, I start thinking like this," she said.

She drew closer to him then and he knew that meant she needed comfort, even if she wouldn't ask for it; it was something he was learning about her—that she was always ready to tell him how much she loved him, how delightful she found everything about him and their marriage, but she would not ask aloud to be petted or soothed, was reluctant to complain or fret about anything purely personal. He wrapped his arm around her more securely and felt her sigh with ease because he had been right.

"You know, you must have already had a great influence on me, Mrs. Blythe, for I think that no matter where you grew up, no matter what who your family was or where you'd lived, we'd somehow have met and ended up just like this before our own fireside, cozy on an autumn evening, just as we are now. It goes against science, I know it, but there are other forces we can't construe and I think you were always meant for me and I for you-even if I'd been spared my near-concussion from your vicious assault with the slate," he said, teasing her at the end so she would say what he wanted.

"Oh, Gil! Will you never let me live that down?" Anne cried.

"How can I, when you always react so dramatically?" he said and squeezed her gently. "It's getting late now, though, so I'll take care of the fire and you can leave the tea-cups till the morning—you're tired and you need your bed," he said firmly.

She gave him a saucy pout and then did as he'd suggested. As he banked the fire and closed the isinglass doors, he thought he must see if his uncle could be persuaded to help with the surgery for a few days before the winter set in so he and Anne could go to Bolingbroke and explore; he was not convinced there was nothing there for her, just nothing anyone else had ever bother to discover for her. And if there was not anything for her but to know she had walked the same leafy streets as her mother once had, peered in the windows of the house she'd been born into, her parents' darling, perhaps that would be enough, if they had done it together. And under the Christmas tree, there would be a gold locket for her—either burnished with wear and engraved with Bertha Shirley's initials, rescued from a long-forgotten little casket in some Bolingbroke house, or one he had made for her in Glen St. Mary, daintily polished and gleaming, etched with a sunburst.


End file.
